General sound map

Recordings of background atmospheres and incidental noises from all over London. Some form part of a sound grid series recorded at evenly-spaced points across the city, each marking the centre of a square on the map below.

Wood Green Shopping City 1:30

Grid square: Palmers Green, Edmonton, Tottenham

Recording date: 27 August 2011

Time of day: 4pm

Location: Inside Wood Green Shopping City, north London.

Description: Sounds recorded while wandering around the ground floor of the shopping centre with adults' and children's voices, music from concealed speakers overhead, louder and busier ambience towards the end.

Wood Green tube night 1:24

Grid square: Palmers Green Edmonton Tottenham

Recording date: 12 December 2009

Time of day: 9pm

Location: At the entrance to Wood Green tube station.

Description: On the left channel, sounds of the tube station, including recorded classical music, there presumably to have a calming effect or drive away youths. On the right channel, sounds of traffic, music from cars and a pub opposite. Voices and footsteps of people passing in and out of the station.

TQ 3231 9205 1:00

Location: OS reference 3231 9205. End of Queensland Avenue, a residential street, around 400 feet due west of the grid point, which falls inside a fenced-off area of overgrown land.

Description: A sparrow chirps close by throughout, faint sounds of activity in the street: a child's voice, hammering, and less distinct noises. Steady traffic noise from the North Circular and the A10, about a quarter of a mile away.

About general sound map recordings

The majority of recordings on the general sound map are simply of curious or distinctive sounds heard around London. Some also appear elsewhere as part of the 12 Tones of London statistical recording project, and here are subsumed into their appropriate grid squares.

These kinds of recordings always have descriptive file names which don't require any further explanation. But just over a hundred others have ones consisting only of the letters 'TQ' followed by eight digits. These are the Ordnance Survey co-ordinates marking the exact centre of each of the sound map's 112 grid squares, and so these file names tell you with some precision where the recordings were made. Reaching each point was done with the help of a GPS receiver and a willingness to scramble over fences and run onto golf courses. The contents of those recordings are summarised in the graphic below:

The key on the left-hand side shows the most common sound categories encountered. The louder a particular sound type encountered at the centre of a grid square, the darker its icon. More than one icon of the same kind means that sound takes up more of the recording's length. Despite the wide spacing of the recording points and the brief duration of the sound files, they seem to do a reasonable job of plotting in outline the common or persistent sound types heard around London during the daytime.